Flood frequency analysis of annual maximum discharge time series

Term project on “Flood Frequency Analysis” for “Water Resources in Changing Environment” class at University of Central Florida.

This interactive web application was built using the Shiny package in R for showing the results of flood frequency analysis.

Data source


Figure 1: Map of gauge stations locations on Pearl river


Table: USGS Gauge Stations
Station USGS Code
Jackson USGS02486000
Edinburg USGS02482000
Carthage USGS02482550
Lena USGS02483500
Rockport USGS02488000
Monticello USGS02488500
Columbia USGS02489000
Bogalusa USGS02489500

Probability distributions

We used following probability distributions for modelling annual maximum streamflow time series:

  • Normal distribution

  • Lognormal distribution

  • Gamma distribution

  • Pearson type 3 distribution

  • Log-Pearson type 3 distribution

  • Gumbel distribution

  • Weibull distribution

  • Exponential distribution

Estimation methods

We selected following methods for estimating parameters of the distributions for this study:

  • Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE)

  • Method of Moments (MOM)

  • Probability Weighted Moments (PWM)

Goodness of fit tests

Goodness-of-fit tests are used to summarize the discrepancy between a statistical model and the observed data. They are useful for comparing the observed values with either the values fitted by a model of interest or theoretical quantiles of a known sampling distribution. We used following metrics for determining whether a fit is satisfactory or not.

  • Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE)

  • Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S)

  • Anderson-Darling test (A-D)

  • Akaike Information Criterion (AIC)

  • Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC)

  • L-moment ratio diagram


Contact

Javed Ali

PhD Student in Civil Engineering (Major: Water Resources Engineering)

Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering

National Center for Integrated Coastal Research (UCF Coastal)

University of Central Florida

Email: